Traffic levels rise, airports expand, and surface routes change, requiring pilots to understand how to maneuver about the airport, and potentially increasing their workload. Besides learning about the different movement areas on the airport, the added combination of changes in weather, time of day and amount of aircraft traffic can increase the risk of error. Several surveillance solutions and onboard pilot aids, like the Airport Moving Maps have greatly enhanced the safety and efficiency of terminal area operations by intuitively presenting to the pilot a synthesized view of the aerodrome surface, visual aids and markings and airport structures.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to increase a pilot's situational awareness by providing an onboard avionics system and method that provides a flight crew with an improved graphical representation of the various features of an airport environment for enabling automated assists for docking of an aircraft without external assistance.
It would further be desirable to provide an aircraft docking guidance system using Digital Taxi Applications (e.g., cues, guidance, imagery, 3D modeling of aircraft types, deviations in path to the gate etc.) while rendering on synthesized views 3D aircraft models of the ownship on Airport Moving Map (AMM) applications. Such information will help bring visual deviations in alignment of the ownship during docking operations to a pilot's attention and enable the pilot to determine corrective and/or preventative actions. It is still further desirable to provide an intuitive representation of distance between references of a synthesized 3D model of an ownship with reference gate or stand points to accomplish a parking operation of an ownship without external manual guide assistance. The present disclosure addresses at least this need.